Follow the Links to Connect the Dots

One result of basing posts on other posts is that it puts a bigger burden on the reader to follow the links through to put the pieces of an event together.

A post on Daily Kos titled “Jonah Goldberg yawns while kids die,” for instance, was about the blogger Jonah Goldberg’s response to an earlier Kos critique of him over his support for the war in Iraq . The post began with a reader’s comment about an e-mail the reader sent to Goldberg on the matter and Goldberg’s response. Then Kos gave his response to Goldberg’s. Next Kos ran another reader’s comment on the matter followed by a link to more comments by The Cunning Realist blog about the exchanges. Whew!

Another subject discussed this day had to do with a blogger’s appearance on the Michael Medved Show. (We’re told nothing about the show itself, but by following a number of links, someone unfamiliar with it could learn that it is a nationally syndicated, conservative radio talk show.) Power Line posted a link to Joshua Marshall’s post on the matter on his Talking Points Memo. When you got to Marshall ’s blog, it linked to the Rock the Vote blog post by the person who went on the show as well as a post by someone referred to as The Count — which was an earlier post by Marshal about someone who is mentioned on the show.

Eschaton’s original post Bats Josh Marshall [1] found a humdinger over at Rock the Vote on Michael Medved, twisting in the wind [2] in his attempt to pretend that Republicans have nothing to do with any plans to privatize Social Security. Oh, my. -Avedon 9:42 PM [3] [4]

The Missing Link

What all this means when it comes to sourcing is quite interesting. In one sense, blogging is all about transparency — embedded link upon embedded link. But if one is looking for sourcing in a journalistic sense — an original source — there is a lot missing. Bloggers link to others but tell readers very little about who those fellow bloggers are, their backgrounds or what if any expertise, relationship or bias they may have on the subject at hand. And if the original blogger who raised an issue is passing something along second hand, by the time it may get to the fourth reference it requires some diligence to realize the absence of a direct source in the first place.

Little Green Footballs, for example, posted about Afghan riots that broke out over the supposed desecration of the Koran by American solders there. The post re-ran a portion of a Yahoo story on the event (and links to the entire piece) and then added,

“Roger L. Simon points out that the Newsweek report that triggered these deadly riots was based on an anonymous source.”

There is no explanation of whether Roger is a journalist, a blogger or a soldier or why we should believe his account. And this post, “For news about Operation Matador, the anti-jihadi offensive near the Syrian border, The Adventures of Chester [5] is the place” gives no information on the blog it links to, the author of the blog or what the author’s stance is on the Iraq war, jihadi or anything else.

In another example, Instapundit posts on a comment on democratization made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the Community of Foreign Ministers meeting in Santiago , Chile . The quote is picked up from a post on another blog —John McCaslin’s — but Instapundit offers no context whatsoever about the speech, about where McCaslin got the quote or about the quote itself.

Instapundit’s original post: CONDI RICE: [6] "'Democratization,' Rice told the foreign ministers, is 'not an event, it is a process.'" Indeed. [7] posted at 11:23 AM by Glenn Reynolds

Readers can usually — eventually — figure out what the blogs linked to are about or who the authors are, but it is up to them to do the digging. If they don’t, there is a risk that what is occurring is an electronic version of the children’s game of telephone.